I’ve spent about 13 years working on one of my own, so The Also Rans is definitely high on the list of books that had an effect on me! And yeah, its a plug, but a highly relevant plug that you can read part of right here for free!
Ok, but seriously to the prompt.
Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People had a big impact on my nascent understanding of how to human. The title is.. unfortunate.. as it implies you are doing psionic control over your hapless victims until they become your willing thralls. Which admittedly would be a lot cooler of a technique than remembering crap like other people’s names and their interests and making those important to you, too. The thing is, Carnegie wrote it in such an old timey way, you can’t help but be charmed by it. Imagine reading it in 1930’s newsreel voice. “Americans are taken by storm by a new fad: Eye contact! Not just for staring down hostile tigers in the jungle anymore, no sirree Bob, but this trend is sweeping the two globes in everybody’s heads and making the world a little more secure from weretigers!
While actually a three book series, the Eddie Dickens novels really liberated my writing. Philip Ardagh is a genius about just making stuff up and rolling with it. I am pretty sure he did not plan his novels, but rather just came up with funny things and stuck with it consistently. Unless it was funnier to not stick with them. Eddie is sent to live with his relatives because his parents have contracted a disease where their skin gets all wrinkly and they smell of old hot water bottles, and they didn’t want him catching it. So they send him off with Mad Uncle Jack, who pays everyone in dried fish, and Even Madder Aunt Maud, who keeps a stuffed stoat who she calls Malcolm. Or Sally. She’s insistent on whichever name the stoat is to be called, only that she’s the only one who can decide which is the proper name at any given point. My point is, he just makes crap up, hangs lampshades for the audience, and rolls with it with such delicious bamboozlery that you don’t actually know if bamboozlery is spelled like that or maybe it has two r’s, like bamboozlerry*.
Third book would be an obscure graphic novel. Not the obscure one I mentioned before, but a different one. Skizz I stumbled upon in a comic shop and have proudly hung onto that copy ever since. The story follows an alien linguistic interpreter, who, late for some alien get together, decides to shortcut through Sol. Which is apparently a forbidden system due to the hostile lifeforms on one of the planets. Which of course, his ship crash lands on. And then promptly self destructs to avoid contaminating the natives. The AI pilot does get suckered into letting Skizz jump ship first, but not with any of his tech (because that would be contaminating too). So its a fish out of water story (well, kinda ET wallaby out of water story) and is exquisitely told, not only from the ET’s POV, but the humans he comes into contact with, both friend and foe. I really like stories that can weave together complex, flawed characters.
Is there a consistent theme to any of my choices? Um, no not really. Just that they each had a formative role in either my understanding of people, zany writing, or rich story telling.
Oh and bamboozlery isn’t a word. I just made that up and rolled past it by distracting you with the spelling.
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